Steven Fink

Steven Fink

Speaker Biography:

Steven Fink, the nation’s leading expert in crisis management and crisis communications, has been called “the Dean of Crisis Management” for his pioneering work in the field. His seminal work on the subject, Crisis Management: Planning for the Inevitable, still the most successful and widely-read book on crisis management ever published, not only explains how to manage a crisis when one occurs, but was the first book to introduce proactive crisis management strategies designed to help businesses forecast and avert crises altogether.

A commanding speaker on very current crises, he typically addresses the crisis du jour, offering unique insight and valuable lessons into a company’s performance in a crisis.

His newest book, Crisis Communications: The Definitive Guide to Managing the Message, closely examines such topical crises as those that hobbled Penn State, BP, Toyota, Carnival Cruise Lines, Netflix, and many others. This cutting-edge book emphasizes the critical role social media should play in proactive and reactive crisis communications strategies.

During the infamous Three Mile Island nuclear crisis, the nation’s worst commercial nuclear power accident, he served on the crisis management team in the administration of then-Pennsylvania Governor (and former U.S. Attorney General) Dick Thornburgh. By its remarkably calm handling of that potentially devastating crisis, this team was widely credited with having averted a panic among the population of South Central Pennsylvania — and the rest of the nation.

Lexicon Communications Corp., the company he founded 30 years ago, was the first to specialize in crisis management and crisis communications. The firm has represented some of the world’s most prestigious companies in virtually all industry groups in both proactive crisis management training and reactive crisis management response, and he personally has consulted with various branches of government, foreign and domestic, on highly sensitive crisis issues, some involving matters of national security and international diplomacy.

He frequently is featured as an expert crisis management commentator on leading news outlets around the world, such as “Nightline,” The NBC Nightly News, The TODAY Show, CNN, ABC WorldNews Tonight, The CBS Evening News, The CBS Morning News, BBC World News, MSNBC, CNBC, FOX News, NPR’s “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered”, as well as national news and business publications, including TIME, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, the Associated Press, and hundreds of others around the world.

Several years ago, he delivered the keynote commencement address to the graduating class at Penn State University.

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Reviews:

When facing an already difficult crisis, the last thing a company needs is to make it worse through its own communications – or lack thereof. As one who has lived through a number of [business] crises and served as an independent investigator of the crises of others, I consider Steven Fink’s book to be an excellent guide to avoiding collecting scar tissue of your own by learning from the scar tissue painfully collected by others.